Davina McCall: in at the deep end

Last month she was pulled out of a freezing Windermere midway through a punishing Sport Relief cycle, swim and run across Britain. What's Davina McCall trying to prove? She talks about meltdowns, addiction and family tragedy

Davina McCall: 'There is not one piece of me that had ever thought I wanted to do some crazy endurance challenge. Not one.' Photograph: Nadav Kander for the Guardian

Davina McCall: in at the deep end

Last month she was pulled out of a freezing Windermere midway through a punishing Sport Relief cycle, swim and run across Britain. What's Davina McCall trying to prove? She talks about meltdowns, addiction and family tragedy

Saturday 15 March 2014 05.00 EDT
First published on Saturday 15 March 2014 05.00 EDT

Davina McCall set off from Edinburgh to London on a bicycle last month, preoccupied entirely by the physical ordeal ahead. She was going to cycle, swim and run the 500-mile journey through driving rain and wind and floods, and had just seven days to complete it. For celebrities who like the idea of an insanely outlandish endurance test, Sport Relief presents an annual opportunity to show us what they're made of. Eddie Izzard once ran 43 marathons in 51 days; David Walliams swam 140 miles down the Thames, tearing a spinal disc and contracting a parasitic infection along the way. Davina McCall, however, is not one of them. "There is not one piece of me that had ever thought I wanted to do some crazy endurance challenge. Not one." She had never run so much as a marathon before. "But you just say yes."

When she set off in "biblical" rain, she knew it would be physically punishing. At one point, after a mile-and-a-half swim, she had to be pulled barely conscious from Windermere. But she made it to London, raised almost £1m, and is still buzzing with pride. What she hadn't anticipated was the emotional meltdown. "It was like somebody had opened the floodgates, and I let out every single bit of grief that I had. I was sobbing my guts out. I kept crying every day. I cried with fear. I cried with joy. I couldn't stop." She wept when she saw her father on the route, whenever anyone hugged her, even if she saw children outside a school. "I think I was just so tired that I had no defences, and I was just sobbing at everything."

She comes across as pretty steely two weeks later when we meet. The 46-year-old has built a juggernaut of a career on TV as the woman we would all want to be friends with – gregarious, intimate, ironic, jokey – and the persona is so winning that it works on pretty much every programme she presents. The face of Big Brother for 10 years, she can do gameshow tension on The Million Pound Drop, celebrity cheerleading on The Jump, reality antics on Got To Dance and tear-jerking empathy on Long Lost Family. So I'd made the schoolgirl error of assuming this must be exactly what she's like in real life. But of course, you do not dominate the television schedules for 20 years just by being a bit of a laugh.

What on Earth made her say yes to the Sport Relief challenge? "Ah, well they're very clever." She grins. Before asking her to take part, the charity took her to see one of the projects they fund in Africa, providing education and an alternative profession to women and children who toil in "mind-numbingly awful conditions" in a quarry, chipping rocks into smaller stones to sell to builders. She didn't really see how she could say no. "But I kept thinking, I'm 46 and I've had three kids. Have they made a mistake? Didn't they mean to ask Fearne Cotton instead?"

The physical preparation only made her more worried. "Every time I trained for more than three or four hours, I had to go to bed before the school run, I was so trashed. I was trashed every day for two months." Her biggest worry was the Windermere swim, because she can't stand the cold, and is scared of swimming in anything where you can't see the bottom. "I have issues about swimming in the Med unless I've got a mask on."

McCall being helped out of Windermere. Of her 500-mile cycle/swim/run, she says: ‘It was like somebody had opened the floodgates, and I let out every single bit of grief that I had. I was sobbing my guts out.’ Photograph: PA

But by the time she set off from Edinburgh Castle, she felt physically ready. The 130-mile bike ride to the Lake District "looked like a breeze, and I thought I might even enjoy it. And that's why the first day was so frightening. Four hours in and I got the first signs of hypothermia, and I was just sobbing and saying, 'I can't do this.' I was half hoping that someone would say, 'It's OK, don't worry – we've got someone else to come and do it.'"

The worst of it was the wind. "You know how they say the Mistral wind in France sends you insane? That's what I felt like. In the end I was just furious with the wind, and screaming at it: 'Just give me a break! Stop annoying me!' It was relentless. Hours and hours and hours of aggressive wind is really depressing, and I found that really hard because I'm normally a chipper person. If you're in a positive state of mind you can cope with pain and jolly yourself along, but I had moments when I went into a very dark mental place."

When her husband Matthew saw footage of her being dragged from Windermere, he got in the car and drove for six hours to meet her. "At the time I didn't feel embarrassed at all by my tears, because I was too tired to give a hoot what anyone thought. But I have felt slightly embarrassed about it since. Because normally I can always put a lid on it, and I was just incapable."

McCall has needed to put a lid on a lot of her life. Contemporaries from her girls' school in west London recall the teenage McCall as heavy-smoking, glamorously punk, achingly cool – but when I mention this she says, "You know what's so funny is that I felt so insecure, and was probably trying really hard to be cool. You know, when you're young and you feel like your nerves are on the outside of your body, and if somebody just brushes your leg you're in so much pain because you feel raw. That's what I was like." By the age of 16 she'd worked out that the trick was to take drugs.

"Drink and drugs helped me feel glacially cool. Drugs helped me stop feeling so insecure about what people thought about me. And I really cared what people thought. So you do things to make people like you, and then sometimes end up being a bit like a performing dog. And sometimes I'd end up playing the fool and then thinking afterwards, God, why did I do that? And that's self-perpetuating, because then you hate yourself because you did something stupid." But once she took drugs, "I can just be. I just felt, like, amazing."

At first she took party drugs, but by her 20s "heroin was my drug of choice. Heroin makes you forget everything, no problems, no worries, no anything." She began smoking it every month or so, then every weekend, then weekends would begin on Thursdays, and by the final year of her addiction it was completely out of control. Eric Clapton, a family friend, persuaded her to get help and for a while she hoped she could quit drugs but carry on drinking. "But alcohol just leads me to drugs, because my willpower completely goes out the window," so in the end the whole lot had to go. Clean and sober by 25, it didn't take long before she landed her first job on MTV.

'I think probably the whole reason why I wanted to be on television was to show my mum that she was making a mistake. That I was amazing. Look at me, I’m worth something. Look at me.' Photograph: Nadav Kander/Guxt

To go from junkie to TV presenter might sound like a radical transformation, but in a way it was just more of the same. McCall's parents had separated when she was three, and her French mother, a beautiful actor and full-blown alcoholic catastrophically ill-suited to parenthood, bolted to Paris. Her father, a graphic designer, sent her to live with his parents in Surrey until she was 13, when she rejoined him and his new wife in west London. She is not the first rejected child to try to make things right with drugs, and the one drug you're still allowed to chase in a 12-step programme is fame.

"I think probably the whole reason why I wanted to be on television was to show my mum that she was making a mistake. That I was amazing. Look at me, I'm worth something. Look at me." If her mum saw her on telly, McCall thought she would finally want her. She phoned her after her first appearance to ask, "'Did you see me? I was on MTV. Did you see me, did you see me, did you see me?' And she said, 'Yes, but why were you pulling all those stupid faces?'

"And I got off the phone and I thought, oh my God. I've been wanting this thing for so long, because I thought that it might validate me as a person, and I phoned you up and it's not going to do the job. It's not going to do it. And then I thought, shit, I'm going to have to try and find it from within."

The first time I saw McCall on TV, she was presenting a Channel 4 dating show in 1998 called Streetmate. The very opposite of Blind Date, Streetmate was a surprisingly sweet and unpredictable format whose success rested entirely upon McCall's ability to charm random strangers. Each week she would arrive in a new city, persuade an unsuspecting member of the public to let her find them a blind date, and then proposition passersby in the street until one agreed. The couple would then be dispatched off to a restaurant, and report back to McCall afterwards.

McCall's energy made her compelling to watch, but she managed to dazzle without being starry, and arrived on TV at just the right time. The era of reality television was dawning and programme-makers were looking for a presenter who could command attention while coming across just like one of us. Beautiful but unthreatening, with empathy as her USP and a gift for making ordinary people seem extraordinary, she was the obvious face for Big Brother when it stormed on to our screens in 2000.

Presenting Big Brother in 2005. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

The only major flops in her career since then were a short-lived experiment with acting in a 2001 sitcom, and a much-hyped but disastrous prime-time BBC chatshow in 2006, from which McCall concluded that she was much better at talking to ordinary people than to celebrities. She has always been open about her past as a drug addict who craved fame, and her ability to connect with the public is invariably put down to their impression that she is no less fallible or flawed than the rest of us. And yet the woman I meet appears to have been driven by perfectionism for most of her life.

McCall couldn't have guessed how her openness would serve her career, so I ask if she ever regrets it, or minds her private life being served up for public dissection. "If I wasn't famous I wouldn't want everyone to know everything, but because I'm famous all my stuff would have come out anyway. I've had to talk about my mother more than I would have wanted to. But then I've also had really touching letters from young women struggling with their mothers, and so you open your heart and it's quite painful to do, and I feel like I'm really revealing a lot about myself. But then if it touches people, that's OK."

One aspect of herself in which she appears completely secure is her appearance. She arrives wearing tight black leather trousers, and submits her face to the ministrations of a makeup artist she has never met before with total trust. It's very unusual to see a TV presenter relinquish control of their image, let alone quite happily, and when I say so, McCall puts on a comic arty voice: "I am but a blank canvas." She never objects to photographers' ideas "because everyone interprets you in a different way, and I think that's quite nice". She laughs about how wrinkly her neck looks in photographs from Windermere, and sounds genuinely amused, in the way only someone who has always felt confident about their looks can be. But she disagrees about the word beauty. "I think one of the reasons why I've done all right in TV is because I'm not a raging beauty. I like the way I look, I think I've just got a nice face."

From childhood, McCall had always worried that she was going to grow up into a carbon copy of her mum. "All my family used to say, 'Oh my God, you're so like your mother.'" She hoped they meant she was good fun. "But I sometimes thought, oh, but you also talk about her in a really bad way, like, am I good or am I bad, which side are you talking about?" So I wonder if her confidence in her looks has something to do with the fact that her face is the one thing she inherited from her mother that she knew was unambiguously admired. When I say this, she lets out a dry laugh. "My mum had a nose job when she was 19 or 20 and when I asked her about it, she said her nose had looked awful. I asked her what it had been like, and she said it looked like mine. But I've always loved my nose."

Her biggest fear was to find herself as incapable of domesticity and motherhood as her (four-times married) mother had been. This probably explains why she can sound both triumphant and a little like a surrendered wife when she talks about her family life today. "Wife, mother, friend and TV presenter," is how she describes herself on her website, having married Matthew Robertson, a former TV presenter, in 2000; the couple live in rural East Sussex with their three children. She likes to tell interviewers that he is "the boss" and has boasted about having an "old-fashioned marriage" because he will walk into a room while she's watching telly and switch channels without asking. Why does she want to be seen as an old-fashioned wife? "He needs to feel that he is equal to me. If we go out to a party and he asks someone a question, and they reply to me because they assume that he doesn't work, that he's a househusband, that really bothers him. Actually he runs his own adventure travel company, and he's hugely successful, so that's awful. I mean, literally it makes my toes curl and I'm furious when that happens, as is he, quite rightly, or when someone calls him Mr McCall, oh my God."

McCall with husband Matthew Robertson in 2001. Photograph: Rex Features

They threw a big party at Christmas, "and you can be quite hedonistic completely sober, you know. Everybody else was absolutely hammered, and I'm leading the conga round this nightclub to mental rave music, and we're all going completely mad, and I'm just as mad as everybody else, but I'm stone-cold sober." In many ways McCall is surprisingly square. She loves the royal family, adores self-help books, and whenever a friend has a problem she will research the relevant oeuvre for an appropriate title to give them (she was so taken by one about childbirth, Spiritual Midwifery, that she bough 50 copies). When she first wanted to make a work-out DVD in 2008, her agent told her not to because it was "naff and cheesy", but she went ahead anyway, and has released a new DVD every year since. "My favourite thing in the morning is logging on and seeing how many people are working out. I love it."

By the time McCall got married, her mum lived in South Africa, but she came to visit before the wedding. "And I was so excited about seeing her. She was in sobriety then, and that was great, and I said let's go to a [AA] meeting." But her mother then sold a story to the press, claiming McCall had feared she was about to relapse and start drinking again. "I was the most happy I'd ever been, why would I bloody want a drink? It was an absolute bomb, and my sister never spoke to my mum again after that." But McCall kept trying to build bridges. "Again and again, because I'm a sucker for punishment. Because I just always thought she'd change. And Matthew would be like, 'Don't do it, please don't do it, you're going to get hurt again.' I'd go, 'No, but I have to, it's my mum.' And I'd be in the foetal position in the corner of the kitchen, sobbing. Matthew would have to scrape me off the floor, tuck me into bed and stroke my forehead for hours." When her mother died six years ago, McCall felt relief. "I can stop trying to make somebody be my mother when they just can't do it."

Her half-sister Caroline's recent death, on the other hand, was, "by a million miles, awful, the worst thing that's ever happened to me." Caroline was her mother's first daughter, born when she was just 16, and although the sisters did not grow up together, they lived together as adults, and continued to do so even after McCall married, right up until Caroline's death. In 2012 she was diagnosed with lung cancer, which spread to her brain, and she died seven weeks later. "She was our other half, she was my husband's sister, and it was the hugest loss of my life." It was Caroline, she says, who kept her going through the challenge. "I felt like she was with me a lot."

I'm not surprised McCall had a meltdown last month, since she seems to be trying to hold so much together. If we went to a party tonight, she says, and she had a drink, she would be back in trouble instantly. "I can still spot people going into the toilet in twos. I can see hand gestures, I can see packets being passed to each other, I can see it from a million miles. If I'm sober, I just think, oh, good for you. If I'm drunk, I'd be thinking, I wonder if I could just go and hang out, and if somebody asks me or invites me in, then I'm powerless and I should just say yes. That's what I'd be thinking, I would. Some people maybe can start drinking again, but I just know that I can't."

It seems to me, I say, as if she has felt all her life that she can never ease off, and has to keep climbing mountains to keep the show on the road. "Yes. Because otherwise the show stops going."